The Tasmanian Visitor Survey data for the period October 2014 to September 2015 has been released and after several quarters of visitor numbers undertaking a bit of mountain biking going up, up and up ... this quarter they've taken a slight dip.

Tthe numbers according to the TVS:

There were 9,481 visitors that undertook some form of mountain biking activity for the twelve months from October 2014 to September 2015

This is down about 200 people, or 2%, on the equivalent previous twelve month period (Oct 2013 to Sep 2014).

This obviously isn't the good news story we'd like to report, especially as total visitor numbers were up 7.5% for the period.

But don't be alarmed just yet - the TVS numbers are only based off a sample, which means the numberts are only estimates. If you look at the confidence interval estimates provided with the TVS Analyser, a number of 10,000 visitors, should be interpreted to mean that we can be 95% confident that somewhere between 8,764 and 11,235 people undertook some form of mountain biking as part of their trip to Tasmania.

This means a drop of 200 people is just statistical noise, and the real headline is that our dataset for cyclists is so small and so new that we really don't know anything about what is happening with visitor numbers.

The trend in overall cycling numbers though does seem to be a downward trend which is slightly worrying.